Only The Ineffable Is Real

The essential point to grasp – and this is a point that we never do grasp – is that no less exists. No lesser or inferior version of reality exists. It is as simple as this – there is no less. The only complication arises because ‘the less’ – which as we have just said doesn’t exist – nevertheless fights tooth and nail to make sure that we don’t know this, to make sure that we never know this. A grim and unrelenting battle is waged – an Eternal Battle in which there can never be any winners.

The good is the enemy of the better says Jung, and for this reason the good fights against the better for all it is worth. There is no battle grimmer than this; there is no war that is fought more ruthlessly than this. All of the violence and cruelty and ugliness in life comes about as a result of this battle – the battle of ‘the so-called good’ against the better.

And yet the irony – as we have said – is that the one who wages this war so relentlessly doesn’t exist. They have nothing to win, even if they could win it. There is no winning; there are no winners. There is no ‘good’. No ‘lesser’ exists – there is only the One. There is only the Ineffable – that reality which cannot in any way be grasped or apprehended. This reality is beyond everything, it’s beyond all of us. And yet it isn’tbecause it’s all that there is. There’s nothing and no one for it to be beyond…

All the struggling and fighting and viciousness – all the drama and intrigue in the world – comes about not because we’re trying to grasp or apprehend the Ineffable, but because we’re trying to say that there’s no such thing. We’re trying to cover it over with our activity, with our grasping; we’re trying to permanently obscure it with the appalling clamour of our thoughts and the fundamentally insensitive and aggressive mechanical activity that derives from these thoughts. We’re trying to say that the Ineffable doesn’t exist, without of course ever admitting that this is what we’re doing. Ours is an underhand struggle, a furtive and dishonest struggle that can never declare its true intentions.

The way that we deny the Ineffable (the way in which we sneakily imply that there’s no such thing) is by obsessing unrelentingly over the squalid, the banal. This is our tactic – we glorify that which is unworthy of being glorified. We make a god of the banal – we exalt it beyond all measure. We make the banal and the literal ‘the be all and end all’ – we base our whole bankrupt way of life on it. This is where all our energy and determination goes – into enforcing and reinforcing the sanctity of the banal, the literal. Without any doubt at all we can say that the whole of our human endeavour is directed towards this squalid and unworthy end – the brutal enforcing of something that isn’t even real…

This is the ancient ‘Gnostic message’ – that the literal world is ugly, brutal and banal and it is of absolutely no value whatsoever in or of itself. Yet all of our purposeful activity is dedicated to it – our life energy is sacrificed daily on the altar of this hideous false god. All of our life energy goes into creating and maintaining the literal or concrete world, which is a world that exists solely for the purpose of denying the Ineffable. Everything we do is done for the sake of the continued glory of this false reality; everything we do is in order to say – by one means or another – that the squalid literal world (which is the world of suffering) does have value in itself, when it starkly doesn’t.

The literal world that we worship daily has no value in itself because it doesn’t exist. It is a lesser version of reality and no lesser versions exist. They cannot exist. This is the one essential principle, a principle that is as sharp as a Samurai’s sword – no less exists. Only the Ineffable exists, and we neither know about the Ineffable nor care…

Nick Williams works and writes in the field of mental health and is particularly interested in non-equilibrium states of consciousness, which are states of mind that cannot be validated by standardized experiments or by reference to any formal theoretical perspective.